Nature Films

Nature filmmaking has a long and mobile history, from its pre-cinematic
roots in nineteenth-century photographic traditions to its current status
as a genre found most commonly on television, and perhaps most
spectacularly in large-format IMAX cinema. Now only rarely seen in
conventional theatrical release, nature films have alternatively enjoyed
significant popular presence and languished in obscurity. Despite the
genre's uneven presence in theaters, its thematic occupations can
be clearly periodized. From the earliest years of cinema through the
1930s, nature filmmaking most often took the form of expedition
travelogues, in which flora appeared as terrain to be crossed over, and
fauna as objects to be filmed, captured, or killed. Meanwhile,
noncommercial scientific filmmakers developed techniques through which
animal behaviors could be observed and recorded for scientific study.
Post–World War II nature filmmaking returned with the animal as
subject, the human rendered either invisible or on standby as steward of
the most fragile facets of an invaluable environment. Near the end of the
twentieth century, the genre, on screens small and large, proliferated in
new forms, fusing readily with reality-based and fictional genres.